Fuel oxygenates were introduced in the petroleum industry in the past which helped in eliminating the use of leaded gasoline and to improve octane value of gasoline. Also, it leads to a near complete combustion of fuel by supplying much needed oxygen during the combustion process (Day et al. 2001). Fuel oxygenates are basically aliphatic alcohol based or ether based compounds. Aliphatic alcohol based fuel oxygenates require extra careful handling to avoid any water content whereas ether based fuel oxygenates are on the other hand easy to mix with gasoline without much of hassles. Therefore, ether-based fuel oxygenates such as ethyl tertiary-butyl ether (ETBE) or methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) were started to be preferably blended with gasoline (Kanai et al. 1994).
Thus, the use of MTBE became common in petro industry and hence increased its consumption ultimately leading to its reaching contamination levels in the environment. Some of the reasons for the contamination of MTBE in environment are its inflammable nature, solubility in water, non-absorbance in soil and resisting bio-degradation. Thus, it poses a high risk to human health and can get accumulated in blood stream, cause cough, dizziness, fever, headaches, muscular aches, vomiting, sleepiness and skin and eye irritation (Amir et al. 2012; Baus et al. 2005) among other problems. There is no definite method to control MTBE's entry into the environment and also to degrade the already present MTBE contamination in the environment.